That is, the only way to really make the parents happy is to never promise a clear path to success, for once you do they will rush to gatekeep it for their child, disregarding the child's motives or perspective. It's the "extrinsic reward negates intrinsic reward" hypothesis at the greatest scale.

The NYT has a century-plus history of pushing the defacto national narratives used by politicians - while they might not be openly backed by any federal interest, they are certainly stochastically willing to play along. Therefore, if they publish something like this, take notice, because it's most likely that some group inside the power structure wants it to now become a political issue as a part of a future economic framework. The current framework is in a failure mode and this fact is becoming increasingly evident at all levels - support for a radical change of some kind must be built and factions are emerging across various sides of the issue.

As the article notes, the last time four-day normalization was floated was the 70's, also a period with substantial labor unrest. The resolution ultimately arrived at then was to cut safety nets, taxes and jobs, clearing the way for investment in the productivity booms of the 80's and 90's. This time might be when the issue is campaigned upon, since the prior doctrine has already run its course and the signals are raining down from up high to attempt a green-energy "own-nothing" economy. The contra faction of this, of course, is also something Rick Scott is pushing - the "crypto economy." The actual outcome is likely to have a blend of both approaches, as is typical with political realignments. Four-day normalization could be compatible. We shall see.

Along the same lines, while not a book, videos and documents about debugging electromechanical pinballs and modular analog synthesizers provide great reference points for what digital systems could look like or strive to emulate, and physical engineering, woodworking and construction decenter the computer as the whole of the process while still being very logical and systematic. At the top level it's usually finding the right structural metaphor that dogs practical programming and gets it into a loop of endless data collection and reprocessing, so it helps to have other things in mind and try to discern ultimate aims.

There's an arcade bar I frequent to play DDR. If I go later in the evening when it's busy I will always get someone who is a bit awestruck and says "I've never seen anyone so good at that game" and I'm like "yeah, there are better people than me" or "the machine tells me exactly how bad I am". But it does not really matter to this audience that my technical skills are less than perfect because what they saw was astonishing regardless. And for me, it's a personal journey in returning to a game that I played for a while when it was new and then returned to many years later, after realizing that having it there filled in a "missing piece" of life and the actual thing of being good at the game was not really important.

More recently, I've been doing some digital illustrations for fun and have gradually built up a process that is hugely digital in its design: composite reference images together, do some tracing over them to study the proportions and planes, then redraw as needed with a simplified design, using art fundamentals to guide me. Doing this has largely eliminated "guess and check" and gives results that are extremely accurate and detailed in their representation, more than any freehand from-imagination result. But that's just one measure of success in the imagery. I'm still going to be a bit jealous of artists who have great control over their freehand lines, but I can finish work this way instead of sitting and dreaming. So it's a great step past the creative bottleneck.

With stories like those of a Chris Sawyer, there's a combination of obsession with the craft and coherence of purpose. That is, Chris spent a huge part of his life thinking about assembly code and its applications towards games, and then eventually put it towards a project that had few contradictions to it, which became RCT. There are many people, myself included, who put years into their game and then realize they were kidding themselves and had an incoherent approach to the design that ensured it would never feel finished or focused. And when that happens the craft ceases to matter - the project is just a timesink.

Failing in that way, putting in a huge amount of time on a game, really made me despair for a bit, but then right as that happened the cryptocurrency portfolio I had made a few years prior achieved moonshot gains, which is like, "oh, well then, I guess I succeeded anyway?" That moment really clarified how arbitrary succeeding can be; the comparative effort/return of the two endeavors is enormous.

You're only 30, and that's actually fine. Between 30 and 40 often marks a shift in attitudes because you're getting out of the feeling of being a "young striver" trying to get ahead of the crowd in a highly visible space. You can fall into a depressed state if where you are isn't where you saw yourself, but it's also easier to give yourself leeway to pursue things nobody else cares about, which means it can be creatively fertile. It just rests a lot more on continuing to build yourself up beyond your personal issues - health, finances, character development, virtues and all of that. Maybe you don't have the fortitude to make a huge game project or research cutting edge techniques, but you can do more modest things and still find admiration as with my DDR sessions.

As well, one can occasionally find reassurances in the literature that the computer is your friend, not the back-office monster that billed you incorrectly last month. Would you feel convinced? Many people saw no use for computers in their lives. And the reality of personal computing at that point was that it was mostly a nerd hobby, with a few niches where it could have immediate, direct impact(white collar information work). Professional graphic design functions, audio and video were all still years away, far out of reach on the consumer platforms. It all cost too much - the computers, accessories, the networking options.

But it's also a representative inflection point: microprocessors as a product category had only been available for a little over a decade, and it only took about a decade from there for the embrace of all things digital to kick into high gear with the onset of commodity PC clones, the Wintel monopoly, and then the Internet. Cryptocurrency is seeing a trajectory like that - we're nearing 12 years in and, like early personal computing, it's understood by few, often advertised deceptively, and seeing massive amounts of growth and capital investment. The applications are gradually appearing, and industry incumbents are hopping onto the bandwagon, but it's sneered at by experienced code jockeys: they work with much bigger and fancier hardware than these toys. Nobody is sure of the business model to use. Prices are all over the map.

The thing that changed with the shift to 16 and 32-bit platforms was the opening of doing things more generally, with bigger simulations or more elaborate approaches to real-time rendering. Games on the computers available circa 1990, like Carrier Command, Midwinter, Powermonger, and Elite II: Frontier, were examples of where things could be taken by combining simple 3D rasterizers with some more in-depth simulation.

But in each case there was an element of knowing that you could fall back on the old tricks: Instead of actually simulating the thing, make more elements global, rely on some scripting and lookup tables, let the AI be dumb but cheat, and call a separate piece of rendering to do your wall/floor/ceiling and bake that limit into the design instead of generalizing it. Simcity pulled off one of the greatest sleights of hand by making the map data describe a cellular automata, and therefore behave in complex ways without allocating anything to agent-based AI.

So what was happening by the time you reach the mid-90s was a crossing of the threshold into an era where you could attempt to generalize more of these things and not tank your framerates or memory budget. This is the era where both real-time strategy and texture-mapped 3D arose. There was still tons of compromise in fidelity - most things were still 256-color with assets using a subset of that palette. There were also plenty of gameplay compromises in terms of level size or complexity.

Can you be that efficient now? Yes and no. You can write something literally the same, but you give up lots of features in the process. It will not be "efficient Dwarf Fortress", but "braindead Dwarf Fortress". And you can write it to a modern environment, but the 64-bit memory model alone inflates your runtime sizes(both executable binary and allocated memory). You can render 3 million tiles more cheaply, but you have to give up on actually tracking all of them and do some kind of approximation instead. And so on.

By building it as a company, you're taking a fundamental disadvantage to anonymous competitors, because the anonymous act as a sovereign micronation and can make the rules for themselves, while you are just another striver within the state, forced to compromise and not step on toes. I wouldn't rule out tokenization as a company, but I sense it existing in a separate, collaborative niche from the anon projects.

Bigger worries for Bitcoiners stem from centralization of hash power, and whether transaction fees alone will sustain the network as it exits the inflationary period.

Ubisoft - and most of the publishers - can't do this because they're set up to make games that are large in scope, boast technical excellence(an ever-increasing bar) and are destined to be yearly franchises: quantities of assets and features are given precedence over coherence, which means that you get a trail of papercut discontinuities, dropped balls and lack of focus throughout the experience. Coherence has a degree of power over the game experience that is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of scope alone: it means that the software, assets and design work well together instead of creating "door problems" that dev time is spent solving. This means that a game built around a design that coheres well is automatically more polished since it never had to compromise the experience to solve problems. Nintendo regularly takes design shortcuts to this end, omitting entire categories of assets.

The true polar opposite to a Nintendo-style approach is something more like Bethesda's open world games: the game that's launched is a simulation engine with a large sandbox scenario. It may work and be playable to completion by itself, but the underlying product focus is to use it in a way supportive of tinkering, modding and exploitative gaming - to let the player bring a complicated system "off the rails". This tendency towards simulationism goes all the way back to Bethesda's origins in making stat-heavy sports sims. It makes for a less immediately digestible product, but one that can garner a devoted fanbase because it promises to give you most of the scope of a certain kind of role-playing fantasy, and then you can mod in the last little bit that will make that fantasy complete. So they don't have to worry so much about making it cohere, because the player is using it as a design tool.

For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away.

All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.

Remember, the last "VR wave" hit not all that long ago. Many people can recite the limits of that particular tech reasonably well - cost, poor accessibility, space requirements, limits on viable "camera positions". The proposal of a metaverse is not really to double down on that particular bet, but to go back and integrate everything top-to-bottom in ways that weren't being done before. It will be half bullshit, but some of will stick.

The games that Another World is drawing on are actually the European action-adventures of the later 80's - the run of games Psygnosis had with Brataccas, Shadow of the Beast and Barbarian were very influential and suggested various ways of thinking about side-view platforming that would influence a "cinematic" approach - Barbarian, for example, really pushes on the idea of having every screen be a self-contained puzzle with major scripted elements. The concept was never entirely new, so much as it was elaborated on from classic arcade game "stages" and transposed from text adventures into graphical ones, at first in a crude sense with lock-and-key puzzles and then gradually with more emphasis on bespoke interactions, animations and environments as the platforms and game engines became more capable. Another World simply took the time to give everything some direction and continuity instead of accepting the status quo on the Amiga of "screenshot games" that looked good on the box but used janky control schemes and filler content.

Mechner, in contrast, was going off the influence of games from his immediate peers like Lode Runner and flirted with the idea of making it more of a construction-kit experience several times through development, before finally settling on a series of set-piece levels. This really shows up in the extremely modular nature of the level design: there are only a few one-off scripted elements, the bulk of the experience is rearrangements of platforms, gate-and-switch puzzles, traps and guards. While his implementation still pushed the limits of the Apple II, this was mostly because it attempted large sprites with detailed animation and minimal pausing for disk loads. A version of PoP with Lode Runner spritework is both easy to imagine and to make fit comfortably on 8-but hardware.

Intel has a long history of selling complete platforms, and they had a major role in disrupting computing in the microcomputer era; unlikely as it may seem right now, they have the power to turn the cloud story upside down and support repairability, client compute and decentralized systems through a radical new platform, with their new process nodes used as a hook. They may need to go lobby their case with governments to get some rule-making in place that drives a wedge in the existing monopolies, but they have the pockets to make a run at that, too, and it's a slam-dunk PR win to be seen protecting end users. Their endgame would be to once again sit at the top of the market, holding most of the customers, but it would be a very different market, and reflective of the kinds of broad transformations that are now happening to industry and supply chains across the global economy.

The thing is, once we start looking at wood in detail, it's never just wood. It's wood, plus adhesives, paints, and finish. You can't use just wood because it rots - you at least need to add some pigment to block UV rays and drainage to limit water pooling. Each of those additives are a potential source of VOCs(volatile organic compounds, the term that more accurately describes "chemicals"). And each step taken during processing adds energy cost. Paper and corrugated cardboard are not innocuous - they use one of the higher-energy processes relative to the amount of input material.

When you look at what you can do besides wood, you get similar tradeoffs. Stone is great, but it's still hard to work with directly, hard enough to not scale to our industrial population - as it stands, you need an artisianal economy of stonemasons to make those huge ancient constructions. Concrete has a huge climate footprint and the dust is a major VOC source. Steel is high-energy and not abundant enough to be used everywhere.

Thus, plastics enter as a way of getting some of the qualities we want. Plastics are not all one of a kind and have varying VOC content. We can't afford not to use them to have this population and quality of life, which means we have to study how to use them safely. The microplastic issue is a part of that, but it's oversold as "plastic is scary". Wood smoke is also scary, as anyone who has been around a wildfire will attest.